2 posts from June 2009

It's only a week away and, at rather short notice, I was asked to take part in the 'The Future of Policy Making' session. http://rebootbritain.sched.org/ 

I've thought of some hooks for this - and I may as well share them in case anyone has ideas to add.

1. Market Research faces certain issues when it gets involved with studying or using Social Media. I'm going to look at some of these, and our responses to them, and then I'm going to examine what the parallels are with something like 'deliberative e-Democracy' or whatever the newer names for this are.

2. One of these issues is the inequality of participation online. A little of this is about access to the channels, but much much more is about personality types and motivation. So let's look at the 1-9-90 of research and the 1-9-90 of policy making on-and-off line.

3. A key element in understanding inequality of participation, and wider issues of 'representativeness', is the crudely worded meta-question... 'who are these people?'. To what extent can we treat every 'input' as having come from a uniform and rational agent, or to what extent must it be contextualised by knowing who it comes from? To be clear, I don't think this is about good old demographics, or even values/lifestyles, any more. I argue it's about personality types, and therefore about what such people will also do in the world, in their lives. I will illustrate this by talking about 'who am I?' and showing how my background contextualises the reception to my presentation.

4. Is about emotion. Market Researchers are becoming more and more at home with, and attuned to exploring, the role of emotion, the subconscious, the group effect, etc in making what might otherwise be isolated as rational judgements and decisions. This goes hand in hand with what Social Media can give us access to - such as images as well as text - or to moments of personal experience. Yet the temptation for 'Social Media Policy Making' will be to make the process more rational, more structured, more prone to cleaning up the evidence. How does this stack up?

5. Is about three modes of 'getting communal' that Market Research has to contemplate... a) creating, and recruiting, artificial social spaces (and 'just for Christmas?') or b) striking up relationships with (and or recruting from) existing online communities, or c) eavesdropping on publicly conducted conversations on the web, often at scale and using automated crawling, harvesting and analysis.

6. Is maybe about the 'short circuit'. I've been thinking about the parallels here, between online adjuncts to policy making, and Market Research. But of course one way that the former can happen is when the policy makers employ Market Researchers to do 'online and social' with citizens in order to inform policy making. The main point I want to make here is that the 'client' in these scenarios is most often an official. Does this create competition with elected representatives and with political activists or pressure groups etc? This is probably a good place to briefly consider whether all this Policy Making stuff is about service design and civic consumerism, or whether it's about governance per se. In short - who sets the original agenda - another question, perhaps surprisingly, that some of our clients are waking up to.

Throughout, just to make it easy, I want to keep glancing across to the practical questions posed for Social Media usability, features, functions, architecture and 'marketing' by all of the above.

And the final afterthought. Crowdsourcing is often part of a recognition that a few people can't get their heads around the definition, status of and solution for some kind of problem. However, most models still (paradoxically?) work on the premise that the crowdsourced wisdom can then be condensed down to 'insights', followed by plans, that a small number of people can get their heads around. Can this be correct/right? What does the alternative look like - i.e. where the application of the 'distributed crowd insight' is also devolved to the crowd, where the elite representatives and officials 'let go'? Is it possible? Does Social Media make it more possible, conceivable or acceptable....? That, to me, seems like a good question to leave with Reboot Britain.

I was walking up the hill towards home the other day. There was a man walking towards me - slightly older than me I guess. To my unconscious social auto-pilot I now reckon he was a 'probable' - that is, somebody it was worth turning my open face to in the expectation of making eye contact and saying "hello". I don't know him, hadn't seen him before, but he was just of a certain generation...

I was wrong - there was no mutual connection. If anything his social radar tipped him off that I was looking towards him and, it seems, there was an intentional avoidance as we passed - to ensure we didn't connect by accident.

It made me think - as it does when this happens... on the assumption that I wasn't wearing a particularly scary face at the time, or that I am generally intimidating in dress, posture and demeanour.

This isn't what it was like where and when I grew up - and where I live now isn't much different as a place. I'm pretty sure that if I went back to my childhood neighbourhood, similar to this one, I would now get just as high a 'no-contact' score. Don't get me wrong - plenty of strangers say "hello" - but the count is down and seems to be dropping, not least amongst those I consider my generation.., people like me.

If I'm right - and it has something to do with inhibition, less social living, more concentration on small groups of trusted friends and family, fear of confrontation or just lack of experience and confidence in connecting with those we don't know... how does this sit with the supposed explosion in social media, in social networks and sharing, and in all that voting and joining in with Britain's Got Talent and Strictly Come Dancing?

Is it that we now connect by proxy? That somehow we can connect at the mind level because our faces and physical presences and social incompetence can't get in the way? Or is it that this is a facile poor substitute for the direct social contact that we are getting less good at, because we do it less - drive to the shopping mall, sit in a personal iPod bubble on the train, work with a small group of people - and deal with the rest by phone and e-mail?

There's plenty of society going on still - of course there is. But I'm interested in the trends and the majorities and how these relate to my personal count of those turned-away faces.

A grand scale argument would be that we are evolving again - into beings who can derive part of our social and mental satisfaction by connecting at a distance, via partial or virtual personae, and that in some ways this may lead to a larger number of deeper relationships - to supplement our 'normal' socialising and family life.

One's first reaction is to think of this as artificial - in particular to wonder whether our physiological and deep cognitive make-up can keep pace with such a change - if change there is - whether this will cause more disfunction and illness through a separation of physical and intellectual presence... a widening of Descartes' dualism.

But then - where do we draw the baseline for 'normal' levels of socialisation for the human species? If our natural programming is still that which works for a large family/small tribe living a semi-nomadic life on the African savannah... were the medieval agricultural fixed settlements of the Middle Ages (let alone the English suburbs and small towns of 'my' 1960s) any more natural to us than a world where we directly encounter few people - treat the rest as economic transactors (shop assistants, restaurant staff...) - and have quite other meaningful relationships with people we rarely or never see in the flesh?

This puts me in mind to do three things:

1. Go looking for whatever constitutes the hard data as regards real world 'connection' between strangers and its relationship to online connections and relationships.

2. Find out more about why campaigns like 'Love where you Live' and 'The Big Lunch' are suddenly cropping up. They bear a striking resemblance to ideas we discussed at UpMyStreet about local connection and the UpMyStreet Party... or UpMyStreet Street Party...

3. Resolve to keep turning my open face to everybody, put up with the disappointment when it's not returned, and refuse to be part of a process of disengagement. (One, that is, I've checked my teeth for spinach...)

Oh - by the way - "Good Morning"  ;0)